Although Napoleon revived the Roman custom of eagles as military symbols for his troops, his personal heraldic symbol was the bee (as seen on the red cloth here): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Grandes_Armes_Impériales_(1804-1815)2.svg/2000px-Grandes_Armes_Impériales_(1804-1815)2.svg.png
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The soldier who carried the eagle standard of a Roman legion was known as the *aquilifer *(from the Latin aquila, ‘eagle’).
The legion considered its eagle standard to be its most important possession and its loss was a terrible disgrace. The position of *aquilifer *was thus one of enormous prestige.
Both the recent movies The Eagle, with Channing Tatum, and Centurion, with Michael Fassbender, were about a Roman legion lost to barbarian attack in what is now Scotland.
The Darien scheme was Scotland’s attempt at becoming a colonial trading nation. It aimed to establish a colony called Caledonia on the Isthmus of Panama on the Gulf of Darien.
The scheme turned out to be a disaster and the colony was abandoned in March 1700, with serious financial consequences for the kingdom of Scotland. The Darien company was backed by 25–50% of all the money circulating in Scotland. Its failure left the entire Scottish Lowlands almost completely ruined and helped pave the way for acceptance of the need for the *Act of Union *1707, uniting England and Scotland as one kingdom.
Darien is the seat of the coastal McIntosh County, Georgia. It was pillaged by black troops during the Civil War, an incident reenacted in the movie GLORY. In the movie and in real life, Major Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts abstained from personal theft and unnecessary destruction of civilian property, while his superiors did not.
In 1343 Andrea Dandolo was elected the 54th doge of Venice at the early age of 37.
Dandolo was known as a benefactor of the arts. He added the chapel of San Isidro to St Mark’s Basilica and expanded and beautified the Baptistery. Petrarch wrote of him that he was “a just man, incorruptible, full of ardour and love for his country, erudite, eloquent, wise, affable and humane”.
Dandolo was the last doge to be interred in St Mark’s Basilica.
The mass shooting that took place on 18 July 1984 near San Diego resulted in 21 victims’ deaths and 19 injuries before SWAT members killed the perpetrator, then-41 year old James Huberty. It was the deadliest shooting in America until the 1991 Luby’s shooting in Killeen, Texas. The 1984 shooting remains the deadliest shooting rampage in which the shooter was killed by police as opposed to suicide. It is known as the San Ysidro McDonald’s Massacre.
The 21 deaths are far fewer than the 77 killed in Norway in two attacks in 2011 by the mass killer who confessed to the shooting at a youth camp, and a bombing in downtown Oslo.
Good Friday is the only day in the liturgical year on which mass may not be celebrated.
On Good Friday April 14, 1865, American President Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot by actor John Wilkes Booth.
The word “Good” is only used to describe Good Friday in English (and a cognate, “goede” in Dutch). The use of “Good” to describe the day of crucifixion is unclear. In the Romance languages, some variant of “holy” is used, such as Sainte Vendredi" in French. In German, it is “Sorrowful Friday” (“Karfreitag”).
A chained-up prisoner in a Roman jail offhandedly tells Brian that he will probably be crucified (“First offense? Yeah, crucifixion”) in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
“Voyage 34” is an experimental song by the band Porcupine Tree, which details the experiences of a young man named “Brian” and his 34th LSD trip.
*Wollemia *is a genus of coniferous tree. It was known only through fossil records until the Australian species *Wollemia nobilis *was discovered in 1994 in a temperate rainforest wilderness area of the Wollemi National Park in NSW, about 150 km north-west of Sydney.
Fewer than a hundred trees are known to be growing wild, in three localities not far apart. Genetic testing has revealed that all of the specimens are genetically indistinguishable, suggesting that the species has been through a genetic bottleneck in which its population became so low (possibly just one or two individuals) that all genetic variability was lost.
The eucalyptus tree, though abundant here in the San Francisco Bay Area (especially on the peninsula), is not native to California. They came from Australia in the 1860s.
The Tasman Peninsula is joined to the main body of Tasmania by a small isthmus of land known as Eaglehawk Neck. At its narrowest this isthmus is only 30m wide. The colonial authorities took advantage of this geographical feature to prevent the escape of convicts from Port Arthur. They built a fence across Eaglehawk Neck and manned it with guards and dogs.
A tombolo is an isthmus where the strip of land connecting the two larger land masses consists of a spit or bar.
An application is currently pending for the first licensed strip club in Regina, Saskatchewan.
The Caprivi Strip is a small tongue of land in the Northeast corner of Namibia. The land was traded with the UK so that the German South West Africa colony would have a connection with the Zambezi River, as a way to ship goods to Eastern Africa. They didn’t realize at the time that the River went over Victoria Falls on its way east, making it useless for trade.
Hermann Göring’s father, career diplomat Heinrich Göring, was Governor/Reichskomissar of South West Africa for a time during the 1890s and also served at diplomatic posts in Haiti and German possessions in the Caribbean. Because the sea voyage and climate was not considered good for children, Hermann remained in Austria during his father’s African and Caribbean assignments, a guest at the castle of his wealthy godfather, Ritter Hermann von Epenstein, for whom he was named and who several biographers believe had an affair with Göring’s mother. While not particularly religious of any stripe, von Epenstein converted to Roman Catholicism for political and business reasons but was of Jewish ancestry.
Albany, a city in the south-west of Australia, is the oldest permanently settled town in Western Australia, predating Perth and Fremantle by over two years.
Albany had the last operating whaling station in the southern hemisphere. It closed in 1978.